@ Kristin - Your comment is absolutely true that people work long hours and it comes donw to a convenience factor. And it is a tool to keep people in hte office, there is no real reason to leave work, just eat and keepon working, if yoiu are tiered there is some fresh coffee to keep you going too. Perks and manipulation, with a reward.

@TerryB, consider me educated ... or on my way to being educated. Your guess is right that I just haven't been in an environment where SharePoint has been used to its potential. I have been in places where it's been promised ... eventually ... to be used.

@Broadway, I'm going into my evangelist role just for you. First, Sharepoint does much, much more than the world email lives in. You can build an intranet with it, extend it to places where email just doesn't go. Here, we extend it to the shopfloor guys, who have no email. We use Lotus Notes, the fully loaded cost of a Notes license for us is about $700 a year by the time Corp allocates a portion of our global WAN cost back to us. We have about 40 concurrent shopfloor guys. The guys can use Sharepoint to see company announcements and access ISO controlled work instructions.

We've implemented a version of Announcement web part that we call a Whiteboard and I have one on every Home page of every shopfloor workgroup and one associated with every office department. People in office can ask for an Alert on their Whiteboard, when someone posts to it you get an email with the post. This gives us a way to have electronic dialog with shopfloor without them having email.

SP doesn't replace email, it complements it. Email is fine for asking Joe Bob where he wants to go for lunch today. But if you are exchanging info on how to do something in your company, it would have much more leverage if stored in a FAQ Discussion forum for anyone to reference it. Who is ever going to find your private email in future, including probably yourself?

That is where this evangelist role is targeted, getting serial emailers to actually change their behavior and use a FAQ knowledge base to share with the NEXT guy who might be filling job of guy you are emailing.

Even mundane things like company announcements/news. Sure you can create a massive group email list and send it to everyone. Lot of overhead on that versus just posting to company news list and letting people go read it when they are ready. Again, with alerts, they can end up with an email if they choose. But most people are looking to reduce email, Sharepoint and other software like it are a tool to do so.

I'm not even going to go into all the other things Sharepoint can do, KPI metrics, wikis, etc. And I'm just talking about the "free" SP, not the Enterprise licensed stuff which gives you Excel Services and stuff. I did not find sufficient ROI to justify that versus other techniques of doing same thing. Meaning, we don't need to have two people working on same Excel at same time.

But my point is, if you are equating Sharepoint/collaboration to email and DropBox, you have some stuff to learn about it.

Not sure why you can't just use a filesharing service like Box or DropBox. Stay nimble, give people the resources they need, and the simplest communication tools --- IM or email -- then get out of their way. Collaboration tools like SharePoint are just a form of buracracy.

Thanks for sharing an interesting survey results. It's always good to know about employment trends. Whats a little surprising is that growth in Manufacturing IT jobs is supposed to be higher than Supply Chain IT jobs. Hasn't it been the other way round for last so many years? Am I reading it right in the first place?

Given the on-going Depression 2.0 American economy, as well as the fact that corporate America has continued to outsource, downsize, right-size and otherwise import masses of H1B visa workers in a treasonous effort to drive down wages for American citizens, I find it terribly difficult to believe that there is a "skills shortage." This has been the traditional rallying cry for companies not wanting to pay fair market wages for the knowledge, skills, abilities & education the industry claims it wants. And members of Congress, being as completely clueless and tone-deaf as usual to everythng except dollar signs in their bank accounts has been the industry lapdog opening the floodgates into this country for cheap, imported, highly skilled guest workers. Secondly, the IT industry would do well to actually welcome all those candidates possessing the appropriate skill sets who apply for the alleged vacancies, but as it currently stands, IT in the US is restricted to males under age 25, everyone else not in that demographic is perfunctorily tossed aside.

Given the on-going Depression 2.0 American economy, as well as the fact that corporate America has continued to outsource, downsize, right-size and otherwise import masses of H1B visa workers in a treasonous effort to drive down wages for American citizens, I find it terribly difficult to believe that there is a "skills shortage." This has been the traditional rallying cry for companies not wanting to pay fair market wages for the knowledge, skills, abilities & education the industry claims it wants. And members of Congress, being as completely clueless and tone-deaf as usual to everythng except dollar signs in their bank accounts has been the industry lapdog opening the floodgates into this country for cheap, imported, highly skilled guest workers. Secondly, the IT industry would do well to actually welcome all those candidates possessing the appropriate skill sets who apply for the alleged vacancies, but as it currently stands, IT in the US is restricted to males under age 25, everyone else not in that demographic is perfunctorily tossed aside.

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